Radicals on the Road

The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Bernard Schweizer

Publication Year: 2011

In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies—socialist, conservative, male chauvinist, and feminist—and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene, and West in his groundbreaking study of travel writing's political dimension. Radicals on the Road demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny, and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travelers resorted to dualistic discourses.

Title Page

Copyright Page

Table of Contents

Preface

MY FASCINATION with travel preceded my interest in
travel writing by several years. In 1987 and 1988 I spent fourteen
months abroad, backpacking through large tracts of Asia, followed by
a stay Down Under and a slow hitchhiking trip up the Alaska Highway.
One place in particular left an indelible mark on my memory. Like...

Acknowledgments

I OWE A GREAT debt of gratitude to Marianna Torgovnick,
who essentially taught me the craft of writing and provided expert support
and guidance during the early stage of this book. A special thanks
also to Fredric Jameson, Michael Moses, Thomas Pfau, and Ian Baucom
for their helpful criticisms of my project....

Introduction

GOING ON A JOURNEY often involves fantasies of rebellion
and renewal. Paul Hollander declares that ‘‘travel and revolution
have something in common. Both are routine-shattering, seen as open-ended
and leading to some, not fully definable, transformation of personal
lives’’ (33). Georges Van den Abbeele argues similarly that ‘‘to call...

Part One

Chapter 1: George Orwell

FOR GEORGE ORWELL, both the act and the rhetorical
figure of traveling were linked with the idea of social and political
transformation. Because of his intense awareness of social differences,
it was enough for him to migrate from one social class to the next to
feel the kind of estrangement typically experienced by travelers to distant...

Chapter 2: Evelyn Waugh

EVELYN WAUGH was an exceptional figure among the
1930s travelers insofar as he produced more travel books than anybody
else and because he endowed them with a harder core of rightist
ideology than most other 1930s English travel writers. Unlike Orwell,
Waugh did not face the task of reconciling his bourgeois sensibility...

Chapter 3: Graham Greene

ANY ATTEMPT TO draw Graham Greene’s ideological profile
is fraught with difficulties. Indeed, Greene’s ideology changed not
only over the course of time but also depending on his spatial location.
Before he joined the Independent Labour Party in 1933, he had supported
both the Conservative Party and the communists for a while....

Chapter 4: Rebecca West

REBECCA WEST burst on the scene of Britain’s political life
in 1911 and she soon commanded a good deal of respect as a socialist
feminist with an awesome rhetorical talent. Her polemical articles,
written during the 1910s for the Freewoman and for the socialist Clarion,
called for the inclusion of all social classes in the fight for woman’s...

Part Two

Chapter 5: The Trouble with Dualism: Sites and Issues

THE INHERENTLY dualistic construction of national and
international politics in the 1930s comes to the fore in the survey ‘‘Authors
Take Sides’’ (1937), which was published, with writers’ responses,
in the Left Review. The questionnaire, which was addressed ‘‘To the
Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales,’’ stated...

Chapter 6: The Geography of Fear: ‘‘Strange Effects of Space’’

IN THE 1930s, as we have just seen, travelers returning from
their journeys were often haunted by the impression that home looked
deceptively like abroad. To Sara Suleri, all narratives of anxiety in the
colonial context derive precisely from the ‘‘productive disordering of
binary dichotomies’’ (4) such as self and other, home and abroad....

Conclusion

ALTHOUGH BRITISH travelers of the 1930s were ostensibly
interested in political issues abroad, their observations and
judgments were deeply anchored in the historical imperatives and
dominant ideologies of their own society. For instance, the disjunction
between Britain’s rightists and leftists during the 1930s is clearly...

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